Sorry... I though Cloudflare was offering full service email (SMTP/MTA). If it is just SMTP outbound email, then SMTP2Go would be a better alternative.
When it comes to banks, there is also a tier where fees are waived for high value customers. For example, checking, atm, wires, are free if you have $50k or more in your checking account.
There is a certain amount of overhead in servicing an account whether it has $5 in it or $500,000 in it. A $5 account doesn't give the bank much to loan while a $500,000 gives the bank lots of money to loan out. So the bank would rather have 100 $500k accounts than 100 $5 accounts. The fees help make the bank willing to maintain the $5 accounts.
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
I think the idea is that it is a numbers game. If you have a way to inexpensively generate a much higher click-through rate than doing it manually, your success rate will go up with a lower investment.
One is to ban it. This has some obvious drawbacks in weak economies, e.g. if the kid's choices are to work or to starve and then you ban them from working, they starve. It also interferes with kids being entrepreneurial. What's wrong with a kid mowing some lawns after school for spending money?
The other option is to create an economy strong enough that parents have no need to put their children to work instead of sending them to school, and then they don't.
What developed countries often do is to do the second one, then the first one, because that has some evolutionary fitness in politics. The more severe drawback of the first method is mitigated when the second one is in place, because then you're banning something people mostly wouldn't be doing anyway. Meanwhile politicians then get to claim credit for "solving the problem" by passing the ban, after it was already solved by something else.
These alternatives generalize to most types of labor restrictions (e.g. minimum wage). The reason only ~1% of people make minimum wage is that minimum wage is dumb so the rate is set low enough to minimize the damage done by the law, while still giving politicians something to claim credit for passing. What you actually want to do is the following: Use transfer payments (e.g. EITC/UBI) to help people making low wages, foster a stronger economy where people get paid more (e.g. make it easier to start a business), and lower the cost of living by preventing market consolidation and regulatory capture (e.g. enforce antitrust and don't allow restrictive zoning to constrain the housing supply).
Then you don't have to ban people from accepting less than a given amount of money because they would be under no pressure to do that to begin with.
> until we can figure out a way to convince other americans that everyone deserves a home
I helped get a homeless person into a place that provided him with an apartment, food, and work that he could do, with a path to helping him become independent. He quickly left because on the street he had a better system for getting money that he could spend on drugs. It sounded like there was a large percentage of people the charity tried to help that ended up taking that path. There were some who were able to get back on their feet. The charity basically felt it was worth giving everyone a chance in order to reach the ones that were actually trying to get out of homelessness. However, as far as providing free housing is concerned, that is what this place did.
Unfortunately (at least for this person), the well-meaning people who were always willing to give him money on the street meant what the charity was offering wasn't of interest to him.
> Unfortunately (at least for this person), the well-meaning people who were always willing to give him money on the street meant what the charity was offering wasn't of interest to him.
Why couldn’t they get the housing AND the money too ?
Well, they were giving them jobs where they could earn money as well as providing for most all the things that a homeless person is going to need. But the return on investment from people just giving handouts is hard to compete with.
I've tried to help some homeless people get into a place where they are provided with housing, jobs, etc. to try to get them back on their feet. They often didn't last very long because they knew that on the street, people would give them money that they could spend on drugs and alcohol. So the difficulty with giving them money for alcohol is that it might make it harder for them to stick with a place that is actually able to help them in the long run.
(And I don't mean to be critical of your position, just pointing out that it might not be neutral in the long term.)
More likely the housing had requirements like strict abstinence without providing any of the support they would need to actually quit.
When people aren't using the services there's always a reason. You might not find that reason valid ("well then they should just quit" etc) but it's there. An addict on the street isn't having a better time than you would be doing the same thing. You have to consider why they experience that as a better option for themselves than the one you're presenting.
> When people aren't using the services there's always a reason.
That is what I was saying. There is the perceived return on investment of using the services designed to help get one out of homelessness, and it is being weighed against the perceived return of going back to the street. If you can bring in several hundred dollars a day on the streets that you can spend on alcohol, the effort of being in a place that is trying to help you change your situation might be hard to justify.
But a big piece of the equation is how easy it is to just get cash from well-meaning people on the street.
I'm not disagreeing with you about needing help with addictions, but there are two sides to the equation.
